Letter Never Sent (1960)

***^½  
Country: Russia
Director: Mikhail Kalatozov

A few years ago, when I was trying to catch up on some of the important foreign language films of the 1950s and 1960s that I had never seen, one of the films I watched which impressed me the most was a 1957 Russian film that received the Palme d'Or at Cannes, The Cranes Are Flying, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. The film was an astounding visual feat, presenting its complex, novelistic story set during the Second World War in a way that combined visual formalism with some of the visual fervor later found in films of the French New Wave. When I saw that last year Criterion had released Letter Never Sent (1960), Kalatozov's follow-up to Cranes, I knew I had to see it. While not the masterpiece that earlier film is, Letter is still an extraordinary film which tells its stripped-down story in a series of glorious images you're not likely to forget anytime soon.

The film opens with four people being deposited by helicopter in a remote region of Siberia. They are members of a geological expedition surveying the area and prospecting for industrial diamonds during the warm months. Two of the group are seasoned explorers while the other two, a young man and woman involved in a relationship, are on their first expedition. The leader is Sabinine, a man who seems driven to finish the project he is in charge of. ("You're a man possessed," one of the others says to him early in the film, to which he answers, "How else can a man get anything done in this short life?") As the group goes about its work, Sabinine is absorbed with memories of his wife and works intermittently on a letter to her full of highly charged emotions, the letter of the title. Just when it looks as if the expedition has been successfully completed, the explorers wake one morning to find themselves in the middle of a huge forest fire. Unable to communicate with their base and with winter quickly approaching, they have no choice but to try to make their way back through the fire-ravaged landscape on their own, an odyssey that fills the rest of the film.

With only four characters (five if you count the occasional flash memory of Sabinine's wife) and the most basic of plots, the emphasis in this variant of the archetypal struggle of humans against nature is not on narrative events or even the examination of people under stress. The defining quality of the film—and the thing that consistently holds your attention—is its amazing visual sense. For Kalatozov the most important thing here is to convey a sustained mood of disorientation and danger in a physical world that overnight has been turned upside down, and the way he establishes this mood is less through character and action than through the film's startling imagery. (The cinematographer is Sergei Urusevsky, who also shot The Cranes Are Flying and several other films by Kalatozov. They are often cited as one of the great director-cinematographer teams of cinema.) What Kalatazov shows us here is a vision of hell as potent and disturbing as anything to be found in film or fiction.

This is a world of menace and beauty, a world where flame, rock, water, smoke, fog, mist, trees, the sun and the moon combine to create an otherworldly landscape, and where the needs of the people in it are reduced to what is absolutely vital to survival. To show this, Kalatozov and Urusevsky use some of the most imaginative camerawork I've seen, the beautifully framed and composed shots edited with a fluidity not typical of the schematic Eisenstein-style montage favored by Soviet-era Russian filmmakers. Kalatozov and Urusevsky's previous film The Cranes Are Flying is distinguished by complex tracking shots which in their elaborate choreography rival those of Max Ophüls. Here too they keep the camera moving, but with a kinetic hyper-expressiveness far removed from the cool formalism of Cranes. Here the camera isn't gliding along in a studio set or a room or down a paved city street, but moving through the forests and marshes of one of the most rugged natural areas on Earth. The logistics involved in all those traveling shots filmed in the wild, especially considering that most if not all of the lighting appears to come from natural sources, boggle the mind.

To these Kalatazov and Urusevsky add a surprising amount of footage shot with a handheld camera. This happens at moments of heightened emotion or danger such as when the group are racing through the woods trying to escape the fire, the handheld camera registering all the confusion, panic, and terror of the situation. This handheld footage never seems gratuitous or exhibitionistic, as it can when misused or overused, but always controlled and purposeful. In more subdued passages where Kalatozov focuses on his characters, he often shoots them in tight close-up so that we see the play of emotions on their faces. These close-ups, like the handheld camerawork, are always used in a controlled way, and the performances are always scaled to correspond to the intimacy of such close observation.

In technique and style, the film seems surprisingly modern for a picture made more than fifty years ago, and the wilderness settings and minimalist plot and characters give it some of that feeling of timelessness and universality found in great works of art. There is, however, one reminder that the film was made during the Soviet era: the presence from time to time of the heavy-handed patriotism which was apparently obligatory in state-financed Russian films of the day. The point of the expedition, we are told, is to free the Soviet Union of reliance on foreign diamonds, and the purpose of the group's exertions to return to base is their patriotic duty to deliver the survey map. Thankfully, Kalatozov's attitude toward this ideological slant seems decidedly half-hearted, so ignore the didacticism and concentrate instead on Sabinine's temperamental need to complete his task and his personal need to survive so that he can see his wife again. Besides the film's sporadic forays into patriotic propaganda, the other time it slips is in the occasional passage that seems overwrought, marred by intrusive music and self-conscious visual effects which only distance the viewer from a situation that's already intensely dramatic.

Still, the main thing you're likely to take away from Letter Never Sent is not so much your emotional response to the film as your aesthetic response to its images. It's appropriate that a film which focuses on the ageless struggle between humans and nature ends as it began—with the camera, mounted in a helicopter, moving away from the people in the shot until all we see are tiny figures dwarfed by a vast landscape of fearful beauty.

To see more of Letter Never Sent, check out the amazing slideshow of images from the film at the Criterion website.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

****
Country: France-Italy-Spain
Director: Luis Buñuel

What the hell do you write about a movie directed by Luis Buñuel? His films don't deal in a direct way with social, political, or ethical issues, so a discussion of theme isn't really relevant. Even on the rare occasions he worked with major stars like Simone Signoret or Catherine Deneuve, he used actors essentially as extensions of his imagination, so a discussion of personalities and performances doesn't hold much promise either. Also out is the topic of style. Though admired by bold film stylists like Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell, Buñuel was himself one of the most straightforward of directors, his style virtually a definition of the expression "invisible technique." Yet he was in a way the ultimate auteur director, forging a creative identity not through subject or style, but by vividly showing us his own wholly idiosyncratic view of the world, his personal alternate reality, in one film after another. While other directors have also attempted this, I can't think of one who has used this approach so prolifically, so adroitly, or so intelligibly as Buñuel.

Like a number of Buñuel's later films, his 1972 comic masterpiece The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is organized not around a traditional rising and falling arc of action but, like a piece of music, around a theme and a set of variations. Here the theme is six people—three men and three women—trying to sit down for a meal and repeatedly getting interrupted before they can get started. The variations consist of their trying time after time to dine, only to be thwarted again. No matter what the circumstances, they just can't seem to finish a meal. It's perpetually delayed gratification, the gastronomic equivalent of involuntary coitus interruptus.

Buñuel returned time and again in his films to certain subjects, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie touches on just about all of them—sex, death, Catholicism, fetishes and phobias, the convergence of dream and reality. What sets this film apart is that here Buñuel's preoccupations are wrapped around his trenchant view of the mores and behavior of the bourgeoisie. His six main characters are exemplars of their class, people for whom surfaces and appearances are everything, not just in their homes, grooming and dress, and genteel pastimes, but above all in their deportment. They are unfailingly observant of the social niceties. Even when disagreeing they are decorous and restrained. Their guiding principle seems to be that one must respond to every situation with perfect manners.

It's an ethos that in this film Buñuel thoroughly trashes. As we know, appearances can be deceiving, and that's certainly the case with this group of people. In their public lives they might appear flawlessly urbane and mannerly, but their private lives leave a far different impression. Led by Rafael (Buñuel favorite Fernando Rey), the ambassador from a small Latin American country, the men are all involved in a cocaine-smuggling ring. Simone (Delphine Seyrig), the wife of another of the men, is having an affair with Rafael. Simone's sister (Bulle Ogier) is a bored young woman who's permanently half sloshed. The cultured Rafael has no qualms about having his country's secret police kidnap a young female revolutionary, presumably to be interrogated and tortured or even assassinated.  Overcome with lust, Alice (Stéphane Audran) and Henri Sénéchal (Jean-Pierre Cassel) keep their dinner guests waiting while they sneak into the shrubbery for a quick one.  All those vulgar human urges these paragons of bourgeois refinement so thoroughly repress have to find an outlet somewhere, and beneath the surface their outwardly respectable lives are riddled with hypocrisy and vice.

Lest you get the impression that this film is a somber affair, let me assure you that it most certainly is not. Buñuel treats all these things with the lightest and wittiest touch imaginable. This is one very entertaining film, and a very funny one. The humor is derived not from pratfalls or any of the other traditional comedic devices, but instead from the contrast between the social ideal these people have set for themselves and the sudden irruption of the unpredictable into their lives. Their world is all about control, both of themselves and of their environment, so any intrusion of chaos is bound to have an exaggerated effect. This works on us as well. The first part of the film lulls us into an expectation of normalcy in the lives and behavior of these people, and when that normalcy becomes disrupted with increasing frequency and in increasingly outlandish ways, we're caught off guard. The effect on us, as on the characters, is not just startling, but through its sheer anomaly very, very funny.

No film director has ever been able to integrate dreams and narrative as seamlessly as Buñuel. Around half-way through the film, he introduces the subject of dreams when a young soldier interrupts the would-be diners to describe the dream he had the night before. From this point on, without ever losing its narrative thread, the film becomes a series of episodes which each culminate in a dream of some act that is shocking to the bourgeois sensibility—an act of extreme public embarrassment, of violence, of the supernatural, of death. The more of these episodes we see, the more the film itself takes on a dreamlike atmosphere and the more we begin to wonder if the entire movie might be a Chinese puzzle of dreams within dreams, all prompted by Rafael's attack of the nocturnal munchies.

As each dream tops the previous one, Buñuel seems to be pushing the boundaries of conventional narrative logic in the direction of dream logic, in which things don't always make sense on the rational level yet somehow resonate on an unconscious level. It's a surrealist vision of art in which images and incidents seem to spring directly from Buñuel's unconscious and connect unmediated with the unconscious of the viewer, a way of artistic communication so inherently nonverbal that it is nearly impossible to describe concretely. This might all sound frightfully intellectual and rarefied, but Buñuel's sense of detached amusement keeps the film from developing even the merest whiff of pretension. He's basically just having fun with the notion that any sense can be made of a universe that is fundamentally absurd.

Of all the images in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, there is one above all others that I have carried with me ever since first seeing the film. At three points—not long after the beginning of the film, again near the middle, and finally right before the end—Buñuel digresses for a short montage of the six main characters strolling down a country road in the sunshine on a summer day. I wouldn't venture to speculate what Buñuel intends by these images, if such a thing is even possible. But I do know that when I think of this film, it's the first thing I picture in my mind, those six wandering characters in search of a movie.

This post was written as part of the ongoing Comedy Countdown at Wonders in the Dark, where The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie came in at #39. Be sure to check out all the great films being covered in the countdown, which runs through late December.

Summer with Monika (1953)

***^½
Country: Sweden
Director: Ingmar Bergman

Summer with Monika wasn't the first movie Ingmar Bergman directed—in fact, it was his twelfth—but it is the best known of the films he made before becoming recognized as a major director, and the one that first brought him serious attention from film critics and filmmakers outside Sweden. Writing about the film's reissue in France in 1958, Jean-Luc Godard called it "the cinematographic event of the year." He even modeled the final shot of Jean Seberg in Breathless on a similar shot of Harriet Andersson staring insolently right at the camera in Summer with Monika. In his own debut feature, The 400 Blows, François Truffaut paid homage to the film by having the young Antoine Doinel gaze longingly at a movie poster of actress Harriet Andersson as Monika. For years unavailable on home video in the U.S., Summer with Monika has finally been released by Criterion in a remastered Region 1 DVD/Blu-ray edition that includes a fascinating twenty-five minute long interview filmed in January 2012 with its star, 80-year old Harriet Andersson.

If you think of Bergman as a man whose films deal primarily with the problems of mature, if not middle-aged, people, Summer with Monika will come as a surprise. Of all Bergman's major films, this is the closest to what might be called a youth film. In a rising and falling arc, it follows the development and dissolution of a love affair and marriage between two young people still in their teens, eighteen-year old Monika (Harriet Andersson) and nineteen-year old Harry (Lars Ekborg). The two first meet by chance in a cafe, where Monika picks up Harry and jokingly proposes that they run away together. Half an hour into the movie, that's exactly what they do. Propelled by circumstances, dissatisfaction with their lives, and resentment of interference from adults, they take Harry's father's small boat and head off for an island-hopping summer idyll of sexual exploration and escape from the tedium of normal life. "We rebelled, Monika, against all of them," Harry says.

For a while they live in a blissfully insular world, sustained by the sun and the sea, the exhilaration of sexual novelty (at least on Harry's part), and the liberating effect of freedom from responsibility. By summer's end, though, reality comes crashing in on them. Broke, disheveled, half-starved, and expecting a baby, they have no choice but to return to Stockholm, marry, and settle down to staid middle-class lives. It is at this point that the relationship begins to come apart, its disintegration hastened by their differing temperaments and social backgrounds.

Early in the film Bergman limns the personalities of Monika and Harry in just a few scenes. In their first encounter in the cafe it is clear that Monika is bold, spirited, and spontaneous while Harry is more inhibited and reactive. A few brief scenes of the two at their jobs reinforce this initial impression. Harry works in the shipping department of a ceramics and porcelain wholesaler's. It's plain that he finds the work mundane and that he is treated by his older coworkers as a scapegoat who gets the blame for everything that goes wrong, yet he tamps down his boredom and annoyance, grudgingly bearing the situation. Monika, who works in the stockroom of a greengrocer's, is harassed by her male coworkers and treated condescendingly. Her reaction, in contrast, is to stand up for herself and meet aggression with counter-aggression.

A couple of compact sequences showing the home lives of the two suggest how different is the social milieu each comes from. Harry lives a well-ordered life with his widowed father in a comfortable middle-class flat. Monika's life, on the other hand, is far more disordered and working-class. She lives in a crowded tenement, sharing a tiny, shabby flat with her harried mother, several younger siblings, and abusive alcoholic father. Hers is an untidy, chaotic environment lacking the conventionality and consistency of Harry's.

With such different personalities and backgrounds, it's no wonder that once they return to Stockholm, set up house, and become parents, their reactions to their changed circumstances are so different. Here the film moves closer to familiar Bergman territory, as it concentrates on the relationship problems of the young couple, exacerbated by incompatible expectations of their future life together. Harry's attitude is that of a realist. As soon as he learns Monika is pregnant, he begins to think of the future practically, in terms of training for a career and establishing a settled life. As he grows more mature and responsible, Monika seems to become more willful, self-centered, and erratic. To her, Harry's equable nature begins to look like innate dullness; to Harry, Monika's spontaneity begins to resemble instability. It's easy to understand why Jean-Luc Godard wrote of Monika, "Only Bergman can film men as they are loved but hated by women, and women as they are hated but loved by men."

Just as the picture's themes are in some ways unusual in Bergman's work while in other ways they look ahead to his later films, the same is true of Bergman's style in Summer with Monika. Perhaps the most singular thing about it as a Bergman film is the large role played by nature. The film opens with a silent montage of scenes of the harbor in Stockholm and contains several other extended nature montages, especially during the long middle section where Monika and Harry camp out on an island, living an almost Edenic existence. I don't recall seeing another Bergman film that dwells this much on nature as atmosphere, almost like the pillow shots in an Ozu film. In its more purely narrative sections, Monika already shows Bergman's tendency to use fully developed, play-like scenes filmed in long, continuous takes, a strategy that requires very precise staging of scenes and meticulous planning of camera moves within a scene. It's a stylistic signature Bergman would continue to use for the rest of his filmmaking career.

Near the end is one scene that shows how Bergman, whose background was in theater, recast theater effects in purely cinematic terms, a technique he would continue to expand and refine in later films. After Monika and Harry have broken up, Harry, carrying the baby, passes by the porcelain shop where he worked at the beginning of the film when he first met Monika and pauses before a large oval mirror on the front of the shop. As he gazes into it, the light within the mirror fades to black and scenes of him and Monika from earlier in the film appear in it. Then as those scenes fade, he sees reflected in the mirror the image of his household possessions—this taking place behind him in the present—being removed in preparation for his return to his father's flat. It's the kind of imaginative, succinct imagery of the coexistence of past and present within an individual's consciousness that would reach its fullest expression in later Bergman films like 1957's Wild Strawberries.

Still, the thing that might stay in your mind most tenaciously after seeing the movie is that haunting close-up of Harriet Andersson as Monika, sitting in a cafe with the man with whom she is being unfaithful to Harry, as she gazes boldly into the camera as if daring us to judge her actions. In the filmed interview included with the Criterion release of Summer with Monika, Harriet Andersson discusses how mystifying Bergman's decision to film that shot was to her and everyone involved with the movie. Looking directly into the camera was something that just wasn't done. One explanation for Bergman's defiance of movie convention may be that although it is Harry he seems to identify with, it is plainly Monika with her almost feral sexuality who is the object of his—and the camera's—adoration. That enigmatic close-up just might be his way of expressing his fascination with the troubled character and the charismatic actress playing her. (Soon after filming was completed, Bergman and Andersson began an affair). In it Bergman suspends Andersson in time and immortalizes her.



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• Cries and Whispers (1973)
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Fox and His Friends (1975)

****
Country: West Germany
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

In the sixteen years between 1966 and 1982, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982) directed forty-four films—shorts, documentaries, TV movies and mini-series (including the 15-hour long Berlin Alexanderplatz), and more than twenty feature-length movies. In some years he made as many as four or five films. Yet despite the remarkably prolific nature of his career, none of his work I've seen ever struck me as hasty or improvised, but rather as always carefully planned and meticulously crafted. He seems to have been a natural film artist, a man of innate creativity whose instincts were so acute that his quick decisions habitually reflected nearly infallible artistic judgment and tremendous technical skill.

Fassbinder was also one of the first openly gay directors to make films that integrated elements of gay life into mainstream movies made for mainstream audiences. Not all of his films focused on gay characters or themes. In fact many, probably most, didn't. But when they did, as in Fox and His Friends, Fassbinder, while quite frank about the details of gay life, at the same time treated it in a strictly matter-of-fact way. He presented the lives of his gay characters not as something sensationalistic or alien, not as a freakish subculture, but simply as a way of life that while unique was in its essence like any other. Of all his movies, perhaps none surpasses Fox and His Friends in showing gay characters dealing with emotions and situations in a way that makes these things easily understandable to all viewers, gay and straight alike. As Fassbinder said about Fox in a 1975 interview at the Cannes Film Festival, "In films, plays or novels, if homosexuals appear, the homosexuality was the problem, or it was a comic turn. But here homosexuality is shown as completely normal."

The main character in the film, played by Fassbinder himself, is Franz Bieberkopf, who calls himself Fox. As the film begins, Fox is working in a cheesy traveling carnival as a sideshow attraction called The Talking Head, in which he plays a disembodied head who makes predictions for the punters. When the carnival's owner is arrested for tax evasion and the circus closes, Fox finds himself on the street and broke, an especially dire situation since he is convinced that this is his lucky day and he will win the lottery if he can somehow get enough money to buy a lottery ticket. He allows himself to be picked up by an interior decorator named Max, uses his unwitting trick to cheat a gullible florist out of the money for the ticket, and true to his prediction, wins 500,000 marks.

It might seem that Fox has hit the jackpot, but far from it. Through Max he meets a whole set of new friends, including Eugen (Peter Chatel), who becomes his lover. Eugen is the son of a family that owns a book-binding factory and seems to Fox good-looking, cultured, and well off. Fox says that what he feels for Eugen is "not just infatuation" but "real love" and describes Eugen as "someone who wants nothing from me." But as the hapless Fox discovers during the course of the movie, not only does Eugen not love him in return, but only one thing about Fox interests Eugen and his friends—Fox's money.

This is a movie with a political viewpoint that is unmistakably leftist. Fox and the people in his world are separated from Eugen and the people in his world by barriers of class, education, and social pretension. Fox is fooled by appearances into believing that Eugen and his social group are superior to him, whereas the truth is that they are without exception relentlessly self-centered, materialistic, and predatory. All the while he and Fox are living together, Eugen is two-timing him with his ex-lover. Eugen's family tolerate Fox only because they need his money to save their bankrupt business. Eugen's snobbish friends make fun of Fox behind his back then exploit his connection with Eugen to bilk him after Eugen goes on a Pygmalion-like campaign to reinvent Fox in a more socially acceptable incarnation. Fox's sister Hedwig sums up the situation succinctly: "Fox the lottery king, conned like a sucker."

It takes the naive Fox awhile to realize that Eugen's treatment of him is utterly manipulative. When he does, at first he ignores the truth, blinded by his love for Eugen, then accepts it with stoical resignation. A good example is the way Eugen maneuvers Fox into buying a new car. He casually drops hints about the age and condition of his present car, then waits for Fox to suggest that he buy Eugen a new one. By this point it's clear that Fox is aware of the way he's being used, but he simply goes along with it to please his lover. The same thing happens when Eugen offhandedly remarks after an argument that they've been working too hard and could use a change. By now attuned to his lover's covert wheedling, Fox immediately suggests that they take a vacation, and soon they're on their way to Morocco.

By the end of the picture, Fox, who starts out naive and trusting, becomes a willing victim of the cynically exploitative Eugen. Even that, though, doesn't keep their relationship from deteriorating into a one-sided affair, with Fox desperately trying to maintain the relationship and Eugen reacting coldly to attempts at physical or emotional intimacy. In the end, their relationship is no different from any other that is doomed to fail because the participants are too divided by class and education and their basic attitudes toward the treatment of others.

I hope I haven't made Fox and His Friends sound like a polemical screed on the exploitation of the underclasses by a privileged and corrupt bourgeoisie, because there's much more to the film than its unabashedly leftist view of human and social relations. The motivations of the characters may be transparent to us—if unfortunately not to the innocently trusting Fox—but all the characters in the film down to the most minor are wholly individualized, and fully imagined and inhabited. The film is always compelling, never schematic or predictable, and at times even quite funny in a drolly satirical way. Visually, it's beautifully realized even in its smallest details and adroitly photographed by Michael Ballhaus, who went on to work on several of Martin Scorsese's films.

But the heart of the film is Fox himself, a tragic modern-day Candide feeling his way through a treacherous world in which love and happiness invariably prove to be illusory. Fassbinder occasionally took small parts in his films, but in Fox and His Friends he carries the film. It's a subtle, sensitive, and ultimately heartbreaking performance that seems so natural it might make you believe Fassbinder isn't acting at all, but playing himself. Maybe there is something of himself in the childlike Fox, but there's no way that someone as uncomplicated as Fox could have produced something as observant and poignant and dramatically sophisticated as this wonderful film.

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• Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) (Queer Film Blogathon 2011)

This post is part of the Queer Film Blogathon 2012. For more information and a list of participants, visit the sites of the co-hosts, Garbo Laughs or Pussy Goes Grrr.

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

****
Country: Sweden
Director: Ingmar Bergman

With the possible exception of Alfred Hitchcock, no film director made as many great movies as Ingmar Bergman. And no director in movie history has more of a reputation for seriousness than Ingmar Bergman. Marital strife, parent-child conflict, childhood trauma, identity confusion, spiritual crisis, madness, war, above all death—think of a somber, disturbing, or depressing subject and chances are Bergman made a movie about it. Yet among all those serious films he is so well known for, in 1955 he made one of the most delightful romantic comedies ever filmed, Smiles of a Summer Night.

In Sweden, the time around the summer solstice, when it stays light nearly all night long as it does in all such northern latitudes, is a special time of year. This is a time for the celebration of fertility and the time when magic is believed to have its greatest power over humans, just as in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the film, which takes place sometime early in the twentieth century, we are introduced to four men and four women who come together at a rustic weekend house party in midsummer, a traditional time for losing one's inhibitions and indulging in emotionally risky behavior. Fredrik Egerman is a self-centered middle-aged lawyer who for two years has been married to Anne, a naive 19-year old. The marriage has never been consummated because of Anne's fear of sex, and Fredrik, who has resolved to wait until she is ready for sexual relations, is growing restive. When he learns that his former mistress, the actress Desirée Armfeldt, is in town appearing in a play, he can't resist going to see her. Accidentally learning of her husband's renewed interest in Desirée, Anne understandable becomes deeply upset.

Their situation is complicated by several things. Fredrik's grown son from his first marriage, Henrik, a rather priggish, sexually inexperienced theology student, is clearly in love with his stepmother Anne. The actress Desirée's current lover is a possessive, compulsively competitive Count and officer in the Swedish Army who is determined to humiliate Fredrik and drive him away from Desirée. His wife the Countess, a woman nearly as haughty as her husband, has been embittered by the Count's infidelity, dismissing love as "a loathsome thing." Completing the ensemble are the Egermans' mischievous, highly sexed maid Petra—she has already seduced young Henrik—and the philosophical coachman she encounters during the country weekend, Frid, a man whose lustiness matches her own.

Desirée comes up with a scheme to gather all these people together at her elderly mother's country house for a midsummer weekend party. After she has brought her players together, she then proceeds to use her sense of the theatrical and her knowledge of the psychology of love and sex to orchestrate a romantic farce in which her cast acts out an elaborate sexual game of Change Partners. Her mother plays her part by providing for her guests at the midsummer dinner a special wine reputed to have an aphrodisiac effect on those who drink it. This is the magic that bewitches the guests and allows Desirée to guide events to a felicitous conclusion in which romantic difficulties are resolved and everyone ends up paired with the appropriate sexual partner.

In Smiles of a Summer Night, Bergman takes a decidedly light-hearted view of sex and love. He presents sex as a game not to be taken too seriously, a game of pursuit and conquest analogous in the use of strategy by its players to a military campaign. Treating sex as a toy, his characters are in love not so much with the object of their desire as with the idea of love itself. For a male film writer and director, Bergman always showed unusual sympathy for the women in his movies. In Smiles of a Summer Night it's the women who maintain a sensible attitude toward sex and love while the men, more driven by their libidos than by good sense, generally behave like fools. Left to their own devices, the males in the picture make a mess of things. It's Desirée, conspiring with her mother and the Countess, who sorts out the muddle created by the men and manipulates the situation to the outcome that is most satisfactory for everyone.

With its complex skein of relationships and the way its characters pair off then separate, shuffle, and re-form into new pairs, this is in every sense an ensemble movie. But if pressed, I would single out three members of the cast for special attention. As Desirée, Eva Dahlbeck is intelligent, poised, and shrewd. She comes across like a goddess in Greek mythology who descends from Olympus and proceeds to maneuver people not only for her own amusement, but to ends that are best for themselves. Gunnar Björnstrand, who made nineteen movies directed by Bergman, plays Fredrik Egerman as a stoical middle-aged man whose life experience has inured him to the frustration, humiliation, and even rivalry of his own son that he must endure to continue playing the game of love. Finally there is Harriet Andersson, who brings to Petra the maid the earthy eroticism and freedom from sexual inhibition that the better educated and better-off people in the movie crave but seem too self-conscious to attain.

Gunnar Björnstrand and Eva Dahlbeck

Harriet Andersson

For those acquainted with Bergman's work, the most surprising thing about Smiles of a Summer Night is the lightness of his touch here. The picture has the delicacy of an early Lubitsch musical or one of Mozart's more airy operas, The Marriage of Figaro or Così fan tutte. Subjects that in a different context Bergman would treat with the utmost gravity—the uncertainty of human relationships, sexual jealousy, the plight of overly cerebral people trying to find happiness in life—are treated here as something to poke fun at. Even the moment late in the film when farce seems about to slide into tragedy and you think Aha! At last here comes the Bergmanesque gloom turns out to be played for laughs, a cheeky joke on the viewer. It's Bergman's most amiable and playful movie. For once he treats the human condition as the object not of spiritual agonizing, but rather of gentle mockery.

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Eva (1962)

***
Country: France-Italy
Director: Joseph Losey

Last week in a post on The Criminal I discussed David Thomson's idea that the early films of Joseph Losey combine the contrary qualities of hysteria and subtlety. None of his early work I've seen, though, contains such extremes of those two qualities as his 1962 film Eva (originally released in the US in a truncated version called Eve). Moreover, while in Losey's early work these two opposites tend to be fully synthesized, here they remain curiously separate, the element of hysteria pretty well confined to the movie's plot, the element of subtlety found largely in Losey's impressive direction. It's almost as though he realized that the events of the film were so outlandish that only a subdued presentation had any chance of putting them over successfully. The nearly schizophrenic result is one of Losey's most restrained jobs of directing in one of his most dramatically excessive pictures.

The film opens in Venice during the film festival there. A writer, Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker), who has just had a big success with his first novel, is attending because the book has been adapted into a movie that is being exhibited at the festival. When his fiancée Francesca (Virna Lisi), a production assistant to the film's director, has to travel to Rome for a production conference, he returns to his house on Torcello to find that a mysterious woman, Eva Olivier (Jeanne Moreau), has broken into the house and is occupying his bed. The aloof Eva teases him, tempts him, rejects him, then finally seduces him. This is only the beginning of a relationship in which this pattern of heartless treatment by Eva continues with complete unpredictability, even after Tyvian and Francesca have married, until she has wrecked his marriage, his self-esteem, his mental equanimity, in short his entire life—all apparently just for the hell of it.

As played by Stanley Baker, Tyvian, a former Welsh coal miner, is a confident, ultra-masculine man, a working-class intellectual with a brutish streak who drinks too much and is not above pushing people around to get his way. He seems genuinely to love Francesca, but the arrival of Eva in his life creates a situation in which he finds himself pulled in opposing directions. On the one hand, the gentle Francesca inspires in him the striving toward a more noble and sensitive nature than, aside from Francesca, others perceive in him. On the other hand, the sudden presence of Eva in his life begins to strip away his self-control and his civilized veneer. Under her corrosive influence he becomes a self-centered, id-driven man blindly willing to destroy in order to satisfy urges he cannot withstand. Worse, she causes him to strip off the mask he presents to others and confront what he has successfully concealed from everyone else—that he is in truth an impostor, a fraud passing off the writing of someone else as his own.

Jeanne Moreau plays Eva with ferocious intensity, pulling out all the stops to portray the most wantonly predatory temptress seen on the screen since Dietrich's Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel. She acts like a dangerous drug on Tyvian—irresistible, addictive, and ultimately destructive. She manipulates him, lies to him, and humiliates him. Her one object seems to be to control him. Why she does this and why she focuses her toxic attention on Tyvian and not someone else is never explained. The most that can be said is that if she is his addiction, then her power over him is her own addiction.

The motivation of her actions may be enigmatic, but her dedication to purpose and the disastrous effect of those actions are plain. On the moral level, the film is a tale of the competition for a man's soul, with the benign influence of Francesca losing out to the corrupting influence of Eva. Once she has him under her control, she does not stop until she has razed his soul. Tyvian may appear too well-armored a personality to be vulnerable to Eva, but she senses the chinks in that armor and is able to get inside, to find his weaknesses and exploit them to cast him out of his Venetian Paradise. With her seductive poses and magnificent face—her huge eyes, swollen lips, and nearly immobile expression—Moreau makes an imposing presence, dominating the screen like a glacial goddess of destruction.


Losey almost seems to use the film as an opportunity to pay homage to the two men who were at the time the supreme masters of Italian cinema—Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. He combines the narrative histrionics and character eccentricities of Fellini with the cool, precise, deliberately paced visual style of Antonioni. He is aided in this by his cinematographer, Gianni di Venanzo, who photographed some of the greatest films of those two masters. (The camera operator is the soon-to-be renowned Pasqualino de Santis, and the great New Wave cinematographer Henri Decaë did uncredited additional photography, the film festival scenes early in the picture.) The film is a visual treat, each sequence planned in painstaking detail and executed with remarkable but unshowy artistry.

One sequence that especially stands out for me takes place near the end of the picture when Tyvian follows the drunken Eva home from the casino in Venice after she has ignored him there. He lurks outside her building and when she comes home watches her as she moves through her second-storey flat. Losey films this sequence from Tyvian's point of view, the camera in the street outside, level with the windows. As Eva enters the darkened flat, the camera follows her, tracking laterally and framing her in the windows as she progresses from one room to the next, turning on the lights in each room as she enters it. The effect is to transform her flat into the equivalent of a theater stage set. It's a masterful blend of lighting, movement, and voyeurism that ends with Tyvian climbing into the flat from the balcony and the outraged Eve pushing him through the window onto a heap of garbage in the street below.

David Thomson is hugely enthusiastic about Eva, calling it "one of the great lost films of all time." I wouldn't go that far myself. It is at times quite melodramatic, a touch too obvious in its Biblical parallels, and rather simplistic in its moral alternatives. But it certainly is something to behold, with such a virile presence as Baker so thoroughly unmanned by the malignant Moreau, whose Eva must be included among those signature performances of the late fifties and early sixties that form the basis of her cinema legacy.

You might also like:
• The Lovers (1958)
• Bay of Angels (1963)
• The Criminal (1960)
• These Are the Damned (1963)

Note: The copy of Eva I got from Netflix, released by Kino, contained both the theatrical release version and the longer director's version, which is the one I watched. Both the picture quality and the sound quality were only fair. The picture was on the fuzzy side and the outdoor scenes often appeared washed out. The DVD transfer was apparently made from a Swedish copy, because I could find no way to turn off the Swedish subtitles. This was a minor annoyance during the occasional brief conversation in Italian, which was translated into Swedish in the subtitles. The only help for Anglophones was that the subject of these conversations was sometimes alluded to in the English-language dialogue.

Hunger (1966)

****
Country: Denmark-Norway-Sweden
Director: Henning Carlsen

One doesn't have to be mad just because one is sensitive. There are people who live on trifles and die because of a harsh word.


The main character and narrator of the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun's 1890 novel Hunger is one of the great outsider figures of literature, ranking in importance right alongside Dostoevsky's Underground Man, Kafka's Gregor Samsa, and Camus's Meursault. In the 1966 film version of the novel, this character, who is unnamed in the novel, is called Pontus and is played by the Swedish actor Per Oscarsson. In adapting Hamsun's book for film, Henning Carlsen, who directed the movie, and his cowriter, the Danish novelist and playwright Peter Seeberg, faced a number of daunting challenges. Yet in the end they succeeded in the nearly impossible task of creating a film that preserves the themes and atmosphere of the book and is at the same time fully cinematic.

One of the biggest challenges they faced was that the novel has no conventional narrative arc of rising and falling action. Its story is less a plot than an accumulation of incidents that impart a mood, a state of mind, an idiosyncratic sense of reality. The film follows a few days in the life of Pontus in Christiania, modern-day Oslo. Pontus is an aspiring writer so poor that he cannot pay his rent, can barely afford paper and a pencil to write with, and hasn't eaten for at least several days. His hunger has begun to affect his ability to write and to make rational decisions. As he becomes more desperate, his behavior becomes more erratic. As his behavior grows more bizarre, he is ridiculed, taken advantage of, and pushed more and more to the fringes of society.

The film is framed as a series of incidents that give us a picture of the the world Pontus lives in, the inner workings of his mind, and the way his personality responds to the environment around him. For several days Pontus wanders around the city attempting to organize his life but never seeming to make any progress. Like a person caught in a whirlpool, he goes around and around, returning time and again to the same point. He tries to raise money by looking for work, always unsuccessfully, by repeatedly trying to pawn his few remaining possessions—even his eyeglasses and the clothing he is wearing—to a pawnbroker who tells him he is not interested, and by repeated visits to a newspaper to sell an article he has written. Evicted from his room for not paying the rent, he spends a night on a park bench, rents another room with the promise to pay for it the next day, then after he can't pay the rent spends a hellish night in his landlady's apartment silently observing her family mistreat and psychologically torment one another. He tries to find food but cannot bring himself to eat at a beggars' kitchen and is finally reduced to getting a soup bone at an abattoir, saying it is for his dog, then gnaws ravenously at the raw bone before vomiting. From time to time, he returns to the same bridge, where he leans over the rail staring silently at the water below. It's a recurrent image that strikingly illustrates the futility and repetition of his life.

As he wanders about, Pontus accosts strangers, haranguing a policeman then meekly skulking off before he can be arrested as a drunkard or madman. He befriends a man sitting on a park bench before changing tack without warning and hostilely berating him. He stalks a pair of young women strolling in the park, cavorting around them and verbally teasing them, then following them to a restaurant. He becomes fixated on one of these women, whom he calls Ylajali (Gunnel Lindblom, who appeared in several of Ingmar Bergman's films), as a sort of fantasy projection of an idealized love object. When he later meets her in the street and she invites him to her house, he has a romantic encounter that appears to be leading to sex but ends abruptly when she gets cold feet. This encounter seems to epitomize everything that happens to him: Any opportunity that appears to be leading somewhere becomes a dead end. Any attempt to connect with the world around him leads to rejection.

Director Carlsen and cinematographer Henning Kristiansen (he also photographed Babette's Feast) worked hard to get the right look for the film. In interviews, Carlsen has said he wanted to avoid the glamor of period pictures, one reason he chose to film in b&w rather than color. In one scene Pontus is filmed walking down a street, and the scene has the typical look of one photographed with a telephoto lens. Carlsen says he tried this because he wanted to convey the idea of Pontus moving but not really getting anywhere. After seeing the test shots for this scene, he and the cinematographer realized that the telephoto lens gave the city the look they were after and decided to shoot the entire movie with extra-long lenses. This gives the film a harsh, dense look that emphasizes the glassy opacity of the water, the oppressive grayness of the sky, and especially the hardness of the cobbled streets, iron railings, and brickwork and woodwork of the buildings. The effect is to make the world around Pontus look cold and inhospitable, a grim, hopeless place that seems determined to isolate him and slowly wear him down.

But the one thing above all else that holds Hunger together is the remarkable lead performance by Per Oscarsson, who won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival and from the National Society of Film Critics. The novel the film is based on is a first-person narrative less concerned with external events than with the personality of the narrator. This almost wholly internalized style of writing is surely the most difficult to adapt for the screen. Because movies must show everything from the outside, there are only a limited number of ways the writer and director can suggest that the world around a character is being shown from a subjective point of view. Two of the most common ways of dealing with this limitation are to show the character's delusions as hallucinations and to use voice-over narration. In Hunger Carlsen does neither. Aside from the selection of incidents in the screenplay, he is pretty much dependent on Oscarsson to convey the abnormal personality of Pontus, and Oscarsson delivers the goods in one of the great screen performances.

For one thing, he looks exactly right for the part. His gaunt frame and baggy clothing, the haunted look in his eyes, his alternately baffled and slightly maniacal facial expressions—everything about him expresses the inner intensity of Pontus and his mental dissociation from reality. He always appears edgy, disoriented, and preoccupied, and just a bit dazed from trying to make sense of what he is experiencing. Oscarsson's body language is also exactly right. He looks both rigid and slightly weak from hunger, as though he is exerting immense physical control just to keep going. Aside from those contemplative interludes on the bridge, he is nearly always on the move, and his jerky movements can be startlingly unpredictable. He often sets off in one direction then suddenly stops, turns, and impulsively veers off in another direction. As well as Pontus's steady but unfocused determination, Oscarsson also expertly conveys his perverse sense of humor. I sometimes found myself almost unwillingly laughing out loud at his outrageous verbal tirades.

Pontus is a victim of life defiantly trying to maintain his dignity in a cold and confusing world. Conspicuously lacking in social skills, he seems unable to gauge the feelings of others accurately or to respond to them appropriately. His mood can change from aggressive to obsequious in an instant. As hard as he tries to be accepted and appreciated, he does self-defeating things that quickly snowball into situations which actually prevent this. When his article is accepted by the editor of the newspaper with the proviso that he revise it within twenty-four hours, he is too proud to accept the sympathetic editor's offer of an advance on his payment. Because of this, he can't pay the rent he has promised the landlady of his new lodgings and again finds himself evicted. So he tries to revise his article on the street, using a streetlamp for light. Then along comes Ylajali and, distracted by her, he is unable to finish his article, the one thing that has kept him going for the entire film. In the end, he simply abandons his life in Christiania and signs on as a crewman on a ship leaving for a Baltic port.

Pontus's hunger can be viewed in a number of ways. His physical hunger befuddles his judgment and is at least in part responsible for his peculiar behavior and impetuous decisions. His hunger for love drives his obsession with the girl he calls Ylajali. His hunger for his art motivates him to sacrifice everything else, even food and shelter, to keep writing and to get his work into print. On the most fundamental level, though—and I think this is what gives both the novel and the movie their profound resonance—is Pontus's spiritual hunger to find meaning in life and his dread that no matter how hard he looks, there is no sustenance to be found, only the perpetual motion of an endless, fruitless search.

The Milky Way (1969)

***^½
Country: France-West Germany-Italy
Director: Luis Buñuel

The General, It Happened One Night, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Sullivan's Travels, Detour, Easy Rider, Into the Wild—the road movie is one of the most enduring and versatile of film genres. Its literary roots stretch as far back as Homer's Odyssey and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. But surely one of the oddest, most unique, and most startling of all road movies is the great Luis Buñuel's surrealistic-religious version of that venerable genre, The Milky Way, from 1969.

In the film two hitchhiking tramps, Pierre and Jean (Peter and John, names clearly chosen for their Christian connotations), undertake one of the medieval pilgrimage routes from France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where the cathedral is said to contain the remains of St. James. As in most road movies, along the way they have colorful experiences and encounters with various people—but with some important differences that distinguish this from the typical road movie. For one thing, this is a Buñuel movie, so unpredictability and departure from strictly literal storytelling are to be expected. For another, because the individual episodes always involve religion in some way, they are linked thematically. And most curious of all, Pierre and Jean act sometimes as participants in the events of the film, sometimes more as observers who wander in and out of the episodes enacted around them, exactly the same as in dreams, where the dreamer's point of view can suddenly shift in just this way.

Each vignette in the movie serves as an anecdote of some kind about the Roman Catholic religion. Except for Pierre and Jean, everyone in the movie seems to be preoccupied with religion, endlessly pondering the polemics of Catholic dogma. But Pierre and Jean, who don't seem to be devout or even practicing Catholics, never discuss religion even though miracles constantly happen around them. Almost as soon as they set out they have an encounter with what appears to be Buñuel's bizarre personification of the trinity—an oracular man in a black cape accompanied by a dwarf and a white dove. Right after they comfort a child who bears the stigmata of Christ sitting alone by the side of the road, a chauffeured limousine pulls up and gives them a ride, almost, it seems, as a reward for their compassion. Later, when a passing Citroën speeds past them without stopping, Pierre mutters, "I hope he breaks his neck," and a moment later we hear screeching brakes and a crash. When they rush to the wrecked car, they find the angel of death sitting in the car waiting to show them that their prayer has been answered. Yet aside from causing understandable amazement, these miraculous incidents have little effect on them and never direct their thoughts or conversation towards any religious or spiritual topic.

As Pierre and Jean make their way to Santiago, scenes from their journey alternate with scenes from the past (including scenes of the Marquis de Sade and the Inquisition), their reveries about what they are experiencing, tangential scenes of the religious experiences of the people they encounter in which they play little or no part, and scenes from the life of Christ that offer some parallel to what is happening to them at the moment. Early in the film, for example, Pierre tells Jean that he wears a beard because his mother told him he looks better with it. This is immediately followed by a scene in which Christ prepares to shave his beard and the Virgin Mary tells him not to shave because he looks better with a beard. At the end of the film, just as the two vagabonds reach the outskirts of Santiago, they encounter a prostitute (Delphine Seyrig) who invites them into the woods for sex. The camera then pans away from the three, and we see Christ and his disciples walking through these same woods, where they encounter two blind men, whose sight Christ proceeds to restore in a weird parallel to the sexual encounter of our pilgrims.

Much of the film consists of people debating the theological enigmas of the Catholic church as though these were the most pressing of issues. Many of the most divisive historical controversies of Catholicism are included—free will versus predestination, the nature of the trinity, the nature of the Virgin Mary—quarrels which have spawned heresies, caused schisms, and resulted in excommunication, torture, and even death for those on the wrong side. Although the debates in the film generally end inconclusively, one—on the question of transubstantiation in the Eucharist, that is, how the body of Christ can be contained in the bread used in the communion service—is ingeniously resolved by an uneducated innkeeper. It's like this rabbit pâté I'm serving you, he tells his argumentative guests as Pierre and Jean observe from another table: the rabbit is in the pâté, yet it's still pâté. As in the other debates of this nature, the famously anticlerical Buñuel makes one of the most sacred doctrinal disputes of the Church seem utterly inane.

What I have described might sound rather like a narrative hodgepodge, with one episode following another haphazardly as the pilgrims proceed along their route, the progress of that journey about the only thing in the movie that could be called linear. But somehow it all manages to hold together, the film's coherence the result of its own crazy internal logic that fuses realism with mysticism, cogency with randomness. The images and the ideas don't fit together in any sort of conventionally logical way, but in the analogical way that dream images and events do. The film clearly shows Buñuel's thorough understanding of the psychological underpinnings of surrealism and absurdism and the exceptional skill with which he was able to translate those concepts into cinematic terms. I can't think any other filmmaker who would have been able to take such an unlikely mélange and make it work so well—poking fun at what is basically a serious subject in such a bracingly comical way and with such bemused detachment—as Buñuel does in The Milky Way.

Knife in the Water (1962)

****
Country: Poland
Director: Roman Polanski

In 1961 Roman Polanski made the last of his nine short films, a 10-minute long silent called Mammals. In the film two men in a snowy wilderness compete to see who will ride on, and who will pull, the sled carrying their belongings. Mammals—a slyly ambiguous black comedy that can be interpreted alternatively as a Marxist satire on capitalist exploitation of workers or as an observation that the exploitative impulse is an innate human characteristic which can never be completely subdued—is reduced to its essential elements: two men, one sled, and vast expanses of snow. Knife in the Water, Polanksi's first full-length feature made the next year, is again reduced to essentials: two men and a woman, one sailboat, and vast expanses of water. Again the movie is about competitive conflict between its characters.

The film begins with a thirtyish man and woman driving down a country road bickering. So involved in their argument are the couple that they nearly run over a young hitchhiker who in desperation has resorted to standing in the middle of the road to get someone to stop. The driver's rage at the hitchhiker's brazenness soon turns to apparent friendliness when he invites the hitchhiker to accompany him and his wife on an overnight excursion on a nearby lake in their sailboat. No sooner are they on the boat than Andrzej, the older man, begins ordering the boy around, telling him, "If two men are on board, one's the skipper." "Or the drill sergeant," retorts the boy, who quickly catches on that Andrzej is playing mind games with him but decides to go along for the ride anyway. What follows is an hour and a half of sometimes civil, sometimes hostile antagonism between the two as each tries to outwit and dominate the other—an extended male pissing contest on a sailboat.

There are many areas of conflict between the two. Andrzej is a writer who has enjoyed some material success, as his ownership of a car and boat in 1962 communist Poland attests. The younger man is an impoverished student who criticizes the older man's preoccupation with success and acquisition. The writer's life is one of middle-aged regimentation; he has planned exactly one day and night on the lake before returning to town. The student's life is one of youthful spontaneity; he has simply taken off for the weekend on an unplanned adventure. Most contentious of all is the presence of the wife, Krystyna. Has her husband invited the student to come sailing with them in an exhibitionistic desire for an audience to their rather theatrical bickering, à la Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Has Krystyna gone along with his impulsive gesture because she sees the young man's obvious sexual interest in her as a possible weapon to use against her husband?

Polanski keeps the psychodrama pumping steadily throughout the entire movie, the compact plot constantly taking unexpected turns and frequently veering into dark humor. But equally fascinating is the film's visual virtuosity. From the moment it opens—with the couple photographed through the windshield of the car, the passing trees reflected in the windshield and superimposed on them as they argue—we are aware that this is going to be a film whose images alone will hold our attention. I can't say with certainty that this is the first time this kind of shot was ever used, although it is the earliest example I can think of, but I do know that I've seen it duplicated in countless later movies and even television programs. With much of the first half of the film taking place on the deck of the sailboat, and much of the second half in the even more confined setting below deck, Polanski continually devises imaginative ways to show the spatially limited action, often posing his actors in tableau-like compositions but keeping the film moving with rapid cutting between shots. The film is also filled with less functional compositions of breathtaking abstract beauty. In Knife in the Water Polanski achieves the kind of artful integration of narrative and image that only the most masterful filmmakers are capable of.

One of the film's most striking compositions—a secular icon?

Few film directors have begun their careers as auspiciously as the 29-year old Polanski with Knife in the Water, creating a masterpiece their first time out—Orson Welles, John Huston, Satyajit Ray, and François Truffaut immediately come to mind. Even given Polanski's impressive later career, Knife in the Water is still one of his best movies and one of the key European art films of the 1960s. (The movie received an Oscar nomination as best foreign language film of 1963 but lost to Fellini's 8½.) Visually fascinating and emotionally lacerating, it is the product of a brilliant young filmmaker on the verge of an illustrious career.

Brief Reviews: The Son (2002) / Yi Yi (2000)

THE SON (2002) ***
In my continuing efforts to update my knowledge of the foreign language films of the last twenty years, I recently watched my first work by the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, from Belgium. It's the thirteenth film of fifteen they've co-directed, most of them also written and produced by the Dardennes. It's also one of their most highly lauded, having received a special jury prize at Cannes and been nominated for the Palme d'Or.

The main character is Olivier (Olivier Gourmet, above, who is excellent and deservedly received the best actor award at Cannes), a carpentry instructor at a school for troubled teenagers, and the film opens with the director of the school proposing to enroll a new student, Francis (Morgan Marinne), in Olivier's program. But when Olivier sees the student's dossier, he has a strong reaction and tells the director his class is full. Olivier eventually relents but seems obsessed with the boy—stalking him, stealing his keys from his locker and sneaking into his apartment, and behaving bizarrely whenever around him.

Olivier seems to have no life outside his work, although we do get a glimpse of his austere apartment, where we witness an uncomfortable encounter with his ex-wife. He also seems to have no emotions aside from the extreme agitation he expresses when alone or around Francis. Francis, on the other hand, grows more attached to Olivier despite his cold treatment by the older man and at one point even asks Olivier to become his legal guardian.

For nearly the first half of the film, we are given no context for the relationship between the two or for Olivier's strange attitude toward the young man. So reticent is the film on this point that it almost seems Olivier might be a pedophile trying to resist his impulses toward Francis. He's not, but the exact nature of the relationship is only hinted at in a couple of places before being revealed midway through. For the first half of the film we are given little but Olivier's unrelenting anxiety around Francis and the mystery of its cause. This rather contrived approach strikes me as less ambiguity than coyness on the part of the directors, and I think it is a misstep that weakens the movie by forgoing any attempt at engaging the viewer's emotions in favor of piquing our curiosity and testing our patience by withholding information, a strategy I found more tedious than suspenseful.

The look of the film is certainly startling, though, and along with Gourmet's intense performance is one of the movie's great strengths. The directors shoot almost everything in tight close-up, following the actors with a hand-held camera. This might sound gimmicky but doesn't come off that way, instead lending the movie a sense of immediacy and authenticity and keeping the focus firmly on characters rather than on events or pictorial composition. It also emphasizes the emotional repression of Olivier.

I did observe that the movie was co-financed by Belgian television (which might partly account for the talking heads style) and also read that it was shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm. The version I watched was in widescreen (with a 1 : 1.66 aspect ratio), and I couldn't help noticing that the tops of the characters' heads were often out of the frame. I'm wondering if the movie was originally filmed in an aspect ratio of 1 : 1.33 and later cropped for theatrical distribution. This would tend to emphasize even further the closeness of the camera to the actors and could account for the awkwardness in framing that was frequently noticeable.

The acting and direction of The Son are unquestionably impressive. The script, however, has weaknesses that are impossible to overlook. That the movie becomes so much more compelling in its second half makes the first half seem all the more obscure and padded. On the whole, I would say this is a good movie whose potential greatness is undermined by some of the artistic decisions of the Dardennes in their capacity as screenwriters.

YI YI (2000) ***
If The Son gives us too little information, this movie, a multiple-prize winner from Taiwan, goes in the opposite direction and gives us too much. I knew I was having problems with this narrative overload when halfway through the nearly 3-hour long film I began fidgeting and checking to see how much longer it was going to run. The movie opens with a wedding that introduces us to the main characters, an upper middle class Taipei family, each of whom is confronting his or her own problems.

The father is coping with strains not uncommon to middle-aged professionals everywhere: a marriage that has grown stale, ethical problems at his work (an IT firm), doubts about the life decisions he has made, and the nagging feeling that his life is going nowhere. The wife, a lawyer, is dealing with both her seriously ill mother and severe depression. The teenaged daughter experiences a disappointing first love, while the young son is being bullied by schoolmates and family alike.

The problem is that with all this potent material to work with, the director, Edward Yang, simply doesn't know when to stop. For one thing, he tends to overindulge a fondness for slow, lingering shots. (Perhaps it's understandable that Antonioni was reportedly one of Yang's favorite directors.) These can be quite effective when used sparingly—for example, when a character who has just had a moving experience simply sits for a while and absorbs it—and as one who generally abhors aggressively kinetic music video-style editing, I feel guilty complaining about this.

But Yang uses the dilatory approach even when there is no good reason. For instance, someone opens the door to the apartment and walks in: First we have a shot of the empty hallway lasting several seconds. Then we hear a door off the hallway open and close, and a few seconds later someone walks into the hallway, turns, and walks toward the camera for several more seconds. Now we cut to the same person walking into the living room, who then walks away from the camera for several seconds before putting down his things, wandering around the room for a few seconds, and slowly sitting down on the sofa. None of this is in aid of any discernible thematic or even dramatic purpose: these people have problems, but ennui doesn't appear to be one of them. What should have taken a few seconds has lasted 30-60 seconds. Calling Jean-Luc Godard!

Even more distracting is the overdevelopment of subplots that eventually become full-blown digressions that divert attention from where it should be—on the father re-evaluating his life. In particular, far too much time is devoted to rambling subplots about the flaky brother-in-law and the young son (after all, the movie isn't The 400 Blows). Not content to show us the touching story of the daughter's unhappy first romance, in a startling shift of tone Yang embellishes it with a gratuitous and sensationalistic conclusion that involves sexual abuse of a student by a teacher and a triple murder. These and other divagations at times turn into soapish melodrama that undercuts the film's otherwise mature and thoughtful tone.

The strong parts of Yi Yi are very good indeed, and it is well worth watching just for these. But at points the film seems in danger of foundering under the weight of its accretion of superfluous detail. There is no denying that Yang, who died in 2007 at the age of 59, was a director of great talent. But Yi Yi, his eighth and last film, is kept from greatness by its overly ambitious desire to include everything and leave out nothing.

The Theater of Life: Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach

"Theatricality always fascinated Renoir."

—David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2004)

The theater has intrigued many of the great filmmakers, inspiring them to examine the blurring of the distinctions between acting and life. Impersonation, disguise, deception, and hiding behind a false personality—all of these examples of the irruption of theatricality into real life and staples of many genres in literature and film—are devices found, for instance, in a number of Alfred Hitchcock's thrillers (The Lady Vanishes, Spellbound, Notorious, Vertigo, Psycho to name some of the most obvious). Ingmar Bergman was intensely interested in the interplay between personality and performance and probed the subject time and again, from his first masterpiece, Sawdust and Tinsel, to Persona to his last theatrical feature, Fanny and Alexander. Aside from Persona, few movies I've seen have been so thoroughly steeped in the parallels between the theater and reality and in the concept of life as performance as Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach (1952).

In the movie, the great Anna Magnani plays Camilla, the lead actress in a troupe of Italian commedia dell'arte players who travel to Peru in the 1700s. When they arrive, they find the whole trip has been a fiasco. There is no theater for them to perform in, the local innkeeper who has engaged them practically places them in servitude to pay off the cost of their passage, the local nobles shun them as too common, and the natives who attend their performances are unskilled in the respectful behavior of theatergoers. Camilla, who has spent the five-month sea voyage sleeping in a magnificent golden carriage being shipped to the colonial viceroy and seized upon it as the symbol of the golden opportunities waiting in the New World, is bitterly disappointed at the bleak reality she finds there.

When the viceroy, Ferdinand (Duncan Lamont), becomes besotted with her, the fortunes of the troupe begin to change. For the rest of the movie, she not only becomes involved in romantic intrigue, but also becomes the center of political intrigue when Ferdinand gives her the coach she covets as a present. This causes a revolt by the nobles, who proceed to depose Ferdinand and sue the bishop, who is the ultimate authority in all such decisions, to support their wishes and order the viceroy's execution.

The movie is part romantic farce, part social farce, and part political farce. These strains intersect in a very funny sequence in which Ferdinand races from room to room as the council of nobles meets in one room in an attempt to force him to sign a decree taking the golden coach back from Camilla and giving it to them, while the furious Camilla waits for him in another room obstinately refusing to relinquish the coach, and her competitor for his affections, Ferdinand's haughty former mistress, a widowed noblewoman, waits in yet another room trying to persuade him to give up the common Camilla and return to her. The sequence is staged, acted, and filmed in a style straight out of French farce.

The viceroy is attracted to Camilla not only by her earthy dynamism and anarchic spontaneity—a sharp contrast to the affected languor of the local noblewomen, with their mannered behavior and highly artificial appearance—but also by the fact that it is only with her that he can abandon his role as a political figurehead and be himself. This is expressed in their first meeting, at a formal dance for the nobility at the viceroy's palace, when he ushers Camilla to a secluded balcony and removes his wig, complaining that it's far too hot to wear something so absurdly uncomfortable. With everyone else he is formal and calculating, forever in the midst of a political or romantic power game in which he must be constantly on his guard to press his advantage and protect his position. But with Camilla he relaxes, and in the entire movie, it is only when he is with her that he ever laughs.

The central irony of the movie is that the nobility are in a way professional performers just like the actors, their lives governed by prescribed conventions of behavior every bit as formulaic as the set plots of commedia dell'arte that Camilla and her troupe perform nightly. The difference is that the actors have a real life when they are not onstage, and the nobles don't. For the professional performers, there is a clear distinction between acting and being. For them these are discrete states: they are either "on" or "off."

In the lives of the nobility, by contrast, this distinction does not, indeed cannot, exist. They are always "on," always performing, and they don't even seem aware of it. Everything about them—their arch posing, elaborate wigs and attire, pompous manners and diction, and stately dances—exists to sustain the grandiose illusion of entitlement that keeps them in power and wealth. The actors know the difference between acting and life and drop their stage roles when they are not working, but the nobles can never afford to drop their masks, for it is through the manipulation of appearances that they maintain their control over society.

For the viceroy and the other nobles, the golden coach itself is a symbol of privilege. Ferdinand freely acknowledges that this was the purpose of ordering the coach, as a symbol to impress upon the natives (and even though he doesn't say so, clearly upon the other nobles) his social and political status, to remind them as they see him riding in it of the hierarchical power structure of colonial Spain and of his own supreme position in the colony. This is why the nobles become so incensed when Ferdinand gives the coach to Camilla, because he treats it as a personal possession, not as a symbol of power and wealth. And they tell him openly the reason they insist on having it for themselves is the impression it will make on the natives when they see their social superiors riding in it—yet another example of illusion and performance merging with reality.

Romantic complications ensue when Camilla, already being pursued by Felipe, the leading man in her troupe, becomes involved not only with the viceroy, but also with the local celebrity, a toreador named Ramón. While attending a bullfight (itself another kind of highly ritualized performance), she becomes so caught up in the drama of the situation that she impulsively throws the golden necklace the viceroy has given her to the victorious toreador, who interprets it as a token of her affection. In another farcical and highly theatrical scene, in the background Felipe and Ramón fight a duel over Camilla with swords while in the foreground the viceroy, who has refused to give in to the demands of the nobles over the coach and resigned himself to the loss of his power and his life, says goodbye to Camilla on the night before the bishop arrives to sign his death warrant.

But in the end the viceroy is not deposed or executed. The resourceful Camilla outwits all of her noble adversaries by grasping, as they do not, the power of theater over life. How, you may be asking, does she put this knowledge to practical purpose? By recognizing that there is one powerful person with more invested in the maintenance of position through symbolism, ritual, and performance than the nobles themselves: the bishop, the man who has the final say in all that happens in the colony. For what could possibly be more theatrical than the pageantry of the Roman Catholic church? Costumes, props, music, stylized movement, elevated language—the church incorporates in its rites the same elements as the theater. By making a gift of the golden coach to the bishop, Camilla not only saves Ferdinand's life, but proves herself the most masterful dramatic strategist—and plotter—of the lot by correctly gauging the irresistible appeal of the coach's grandeur to the bishop's vanity. In thanking Camilla for her gift, the bishop actually says with a straight face that now when he is driven to give the last rites to a dying peasant, he will arrive in a vehicle befitting his position as spiritual head of the colony!

The Golden Coach benefits greatly from its Technicolor cinematography by the director's nephew, Claude Renoir, who worked with Jean Renoir on several of his movies. Filmed at Cinecittà in Rome, the movie has a gleaming, silvery glow that mirrors the sunblanched desert tones of the sky, sand, stone, and stucco of its setting. The film also benefits from the music of Vivaldi, which is contemporary with its setting and which Renoir says he used as an inspiration while planning the movie. But above all it benefits from the presence of the magnificent Anna Magnani. When unrestrained, Magnani can sometimes be just a bit too much larger-than-life. But here she has just the right amount of exuberance, willfulness, and voluptuousness. It's easy to see why the viceroy becomes so enamored of her, for her appeal shines through not so much in physical beauty as in her sensuousness, her liveliness, and her robust enjoyment of life—all qualities lacking in the effete noblewomen the viceroy normally socializes with and romances.

But most of all, Magnani's beauty is expressed through her huge, soulful, bovine eyes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final scene of the movie. Like Olivier's Henry V, The Golden Coach opens and closes in a theater, and the entire movie is framed as a stage performance. In the last scene, the curtain descends, and the camera draws back to show the proscenium. Don Antonio, the manager of the troupe, stands to the left and delivers an epilogue on the superiority of the theater to "so-called real life." As the camera moves in for a medium close shot of Magnani, standing dead in the center of the stage in front of the curtain, she mutters distractedly, "Felipe, the bishop, Ramón, the viceroy . . . disappeared, gone."

"Do you miss them?" Don Felipe asks her.

"A little," she answers wistfully, raising those dark, melancholy eyes and looking directly into the camera, which lingers on her face in a haunting final shot that in its power and beauty rivals the last shot of Garbo in Queen Christina.